Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

WEP challenges are FREE and open to all. On the 1st   of the challenge month, there will be a   get-your-thinking-caps   on post. The badge will include the dates of the challenge and the winner’s   prizes. The InLinkz sign up will open on the third Wednesday and close 3 days later. It will contain no news, just the sign up. Participants link up with their DLs (Direct Links to their entry).  Learn all about it here .    My entry this time is based on an actual incident. Mom and my brothers will recognize it. My apologies to them for the non-trivial liberties I took with history and their personalities. We are now also meant to provide a tag line for our stories, so here's mine: What terrors lurk in the root cellar?     The Scream The house we lived in that year wasn’t much. The wind blew in everywhere you could imagine a draft, and some places you couldn’t. The old enclosed porch we used as a root cellar was worse. It wasn’t just the wind that could get in through the chinks a

  Title: Beyond the Call: The True Story of One World War II Pilot's Covert Mission to Rescue POWs on the Eastern Front Author: Lee Trimble with Jeremy Dronfield. Read by Donald Corren Publication Info: Audible Audio, 2015. 11 hours. Hardcover 2015 by Berkley, 352 pages. Source: Library digital resources   Publisher’s Blurb: Near the end of World War II, thousands of Allied ex-POWs were abandoned to wander the war-torn Eastern Front, modern day Ukraine. With no food, shelter, or supplies, they were an army of dying men. The Red Army had pushed the Nazis out of Russia. As they advanced across Poland, the prison camps of the Third Reich were discovered and liberated. In defiance of humanity, the freed Allied prisoners were discarded without aid. The Soviets viewed POWs as cowards, and regarded all refugees as potential spies or partisans. The United States repeatedly offered to help recover their POWs, but were refused. With relations between the allies strained, a plan wa

After more than two weeks of day-hike training and the shorter (but still rather stiff) Pine Creek backpack trip, we set off on the main event, a 4-night, many-lake loop near Mammoth, CA. Day 1 was a 9-mile + hike up to Thousand Island Lake, along the High Trail, one of two trails that count as the Pacific Crest Trail north of Agnew Meadows. Banner (right) and Ritter were the peaks that defined much of this trip, as we pivoted about them. It was a long day, but we made 1000 Island Lake with enough energy to find a nice, tucked-away campsite. It's a very popular area, so we weren't far from neighbors, but we had our privacy. Camp, with our almost-matching TarpTents. There was lots of smoke in the air, which at least made for interesting light. There was so much smoke that first night that we wondered if we should continue the trip, but as nothing could be done that night, we went to bed. It was much better in the morning. First light, and a setting moon. Banner Peak on the left

  The Fog Ladies: In the Soup (A San Francisco Cozy Murder Mystery) by Susan McCormick About The Fog Ladies: In the Soup   The Fog Ladies: In the Soup (A San Francisco Cozy Murder Mystery)   Cozy Mystery 3rd in Series   Setting — San Francisco Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wild Rose Press (October 4, 2021) Paperback ‏ : ‎ 328 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1509237984 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1509237982 Digital Print Length ‏ : ‎ 230 pages ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09C91H76Z The Fog Ladies are back, in the third installment of this endearing cozy murder mystery series. "There was a man in the soup." When the Fog Ladies volunteer at a San Francisco soup kitchen, these spunky elderly friends plus one overworked young doctor-in-training envision washing and chopping and serving. Not murder. Now the soup kitchen is doomed, and the mysteries have just begun. Was the death rooted in a long-ago grudge? Can they save the soup kitchen? Will they find the killer? Could the Fog Ladies, too, end up "in the soup"?   My Revi

Thanks to getting home fairly late on Wednesday and having a lot to do, I decided to make my Friday post a Saturday post this week. Then it slipped, so now it's a Sunday post. I like to keep my readers on their toes! I spent August in the Sierra with my brother- and sister-in-law. I've shared the training hikes we did; this was the first of two backpacks, a 3-night trip up Pine Creek to Granite Park, with a dayhike to Pine Creek Pass. I'll let the photos mostly tell the tale. A crack of dawn start let us climb up out of the smoke before it was hot, anyway. A couple of hours took us to the "real" mountain setting along Pine Creek. Upper Pine Lake Honeymoon Lake Camp #1 Honeymoon Lake Day 2 saw us completing the climb to Granite Park, a day with short mileage but more big climbing. Granite Park camp. Later I had to move from this spot, as it was too exposed to the winds that howled through with 30-40 mph gusts. A persistent neighbor The crack of dawn, smoke-colored